The
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Resources IndexIt seems rather wide-spread in our culture, even in the church as well, to believe that the church and religion are somehow impractical matters. The church and religious faith are viewed as a sort of ivory tower thing. They are about the next world. They are about something far away and not at all related to, or particularly relevant to, the real stuff of daily living. I believe that is the way church and religion are often portrayed in the television shows and in the movies.
I have thought about an experience I had a long time ago when I was in my first appointment. A woman in the church got very angry at me and at the church, and in her anger she said to me one day, "You know, the church doesn't contribute a thing to the gross national product." And by that I suppose she meant that it wasn't practical, that it didn't make any real difference, that it was frivolous.
I thought about that this week as I thought about the text that I just read. It is a text that is often read at funerals. It is one where Jesus anticipates God's reign in heaven, and he talks about what God's reign would be like with "in my Father's house are many mansions" as many of us learned it as children in the King James Version. The New Revised Standard translation says, "in my Father's house there are many dwelling places." Some of the very modern colloquial translations of the Bible say, "in God's house are many rooms." However you translate it, it is an image of an open thing that is widely embracing of all. Many mansions, many dwelling places, many rooms, lots of rooms, a place for everyone.
In his last supper with his disciples, Jesus was talking about the coming reign of God, and the church has always understood its task as representing heaven on earth. We are heaven's embassy, if you will, in this foreign land of the earth. The church is to be a place where the nature of God's reign and rule is manifest in the way we live and the way we open our arms and the way in which the rooms are available for everyone. In God's house are many rooms. I want us to think about the rooms in this house and think about them from the point of view of the woman who said the church contributes nothing to the gross national product. Let's think about the practicality, the relevance, if any, of these rooms.
We could begin with this one. Large as this room is and with the way it is decorated and appointed, its uses are limited. It might seem to be a very impractical place. It would be awkward to store hay in this room, and you sure could not play basketball here. It doesn't have a great diversity of uses, and the uses to which it is put may seem ivory towerish, but in the last week or two there have been several practical events. Yesterday there was a wedding here. I don't know anything more earthly, more practical, more down-to-earth, more human than the commitment of people to spend their lives in covenant relationship with one another. That is about as human as it gets, isn't it? That's not ivory towerish; it's not far off, pie in the sky. Marriage is real life! All cultures, in all human histories, have had some sort of ceremonial way of drawing together a couple to make their promises to each other in the context of the community and whatever faith system that community followed. Families and marriages are about all of us. They are pretty practical things.
Last week I met with a member of this congregation who is dying, and we met to plan his funeral. It will happen here. I do not know anything more ordinary, more down-to-earth than death and grief and good-byes, do you? It is really pretty practical.
The things we do here shape our lives. Young people and not so young people come and go, and they choose careers, and they settle on the kind of values they will have for their personal life and their careers and their witness to the community. It makes a difference. If this in an ordinary year, thirty-five thousand people will come and go through the doors of this church to worship alone, not counting everything else that goes on in these rooms. Thirty-five thousand! So if we worry about the sound system, or if the lighting is adequate, or the choir loft is large enough and all those kinds of things that were a part of our restoration, we are not dealing with the far away and impractical and heavenly and ivory towerish issues. We are dealing with the real stuff of life. In God's house there are many rooms.
Another one of our rooms is Whittler Hall. You would be amazed at the things that happen in Whittler Hall. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, it is a play area for little children. It is a place where children who are brought to our Discovery Days program, our pre-school program, have their activities during the winter. If you don't think child-care is a practical and important thing in our society, I do not know what you're thinking about. I don't know of anything more down-to-earth and important and valuable to the lives of people than safe, loving, Christian care for their children during the day. It is very important.
Earlier this week I had a conversation with a couple of members of our church in Whittler Hall. Notice that new banner over there about our "Finish the Race" campaign; the pieces of it were spread out over tables and the women were still cutting and sewing and stitching on it. Whittler Hall was a seamstresses' shop for a while earlier this week. And the Boy Scouts meet in Whittler Hall every Monday night and do what Boy Scouts do.
I wonder how many of you have signed up for something in Whittler Hall. You have signed up to take Christmas baskets to someone. You have signed up to be a part of an Angel Tree program. You have signed up to buy pecans. You have signed up to go on Volunteers In Mission. You have signed up to be a part of R.A.I.N. You have signed up for something in Whittle Hall. I have a feeling more people have signed up for things in Whittler Hall than in any other room in Columbia. I have this fantasy that if everyone who ever signed up in Whittler Hall to do something were to autograph the walls, the names would be about a foot deep there. Add administrative meetings, and the list goes on and on and on. There are many rooms in God's house.
Down the hallway here, there are offices. That's practical sounding, isn't it? I bet you wonder what goes on in the offices during the week. You secretly suspect that since preachers only work a half day a week that if we are here, we are twiddling our thumbs or playing solitaire or who knows what. Let me tell you some things that have happened in my office recently. During the last two weeks, there has been a parade of couples who want to get married. We have weddings every weekend from now to about the first of July. Sometimes there is more than one each weekend. It seems as if it's like Baskin-Robbins: you have to take a number to get in line to come in and talk about your wedding.
Not everything that comes through there is quite so happy though. Just this week, I had a young woman come to my office to talk. She is single, and she is five and a half months pregnant. She has already decided, obviously, to carry the child full-term, but she has not decided whether she can face the challenges of being a young, single parent or whether or not she has the fortitude to release her baby for adoption to be raised by someone else. That's pretty human stuff, it seems to me. Not just theoretical, not just ivory tower. But real lives of real people.
In the last couple of weeks, I have had folks in my office who were seeking a church home and were not completely sure whether their theological position and ours were compatible. They wanted to talk about it. In the last two weeks, I have had people come to my office dealing in their own personal issues as diverse as date rape and spiritual renewal. In God's house are many rooms.
There are classrooms where the A.A. groups meet and the week-day Bible studies, sometimes in the same rooms at different hours. On and on it goes. The rooms of God's house are very practical and part of our job as the church of Jesus Christ is to make the rooms as open and as inviting and as welcoming as they possibly can be, for all the kinds of real-life, human dramas and hopes and dreams that are a part of our lives together.
Two years ago when we voted as a congregation to renew this old house, to make it sparkle again, to make it physically more welcoming than it had been before, you knew that the projects on which we were voting were going to cost more than the Faith in Action campaign was going to generate. That was known. It was open. It was on the table. It was part of the discussion. You as a church voted to go ahead, and now it is time to Finish the Race, because it is not practical to have twenty years of debt service. It is not practical to have the program of this church squeezed for twenty years. It is not practical to pay eight-hundred thousand to a million dollars in interest, bleeding out from the programs of the church.
Fred Craddock, who is perhaps one of the great preachers of this century, has a story he likes to tell about a man who bought and moved into a cabin in the woods. (I don't think it was the Unabomber suspect, but it might have been.) He moved in the summer, and he loved his cabin in the woods, and it was just great and wonderful, and fall came, and it was beautiful in the woods, and then winter came, and his cabin got cold. There was a wood stove in the cabin, but no firewood. He got so cold one day that he went outside and took a couple of boards off the side of the cabin and burned them to warm his room. The fire was warm, but the cabin seemed strangely colder. Because it seemed strangely colder, he decided he needed a bigger fire, so he went out and he tore some more wood off the side of the cabin. This went on for about three days, and then in frustration and half frozen to death, the man cursed the weather, cursed the house, cursed the stove, and moved away.
That is a parable for what we face. If we do not Finish the Race promptly, we will find ourselves pulling the planks off the side of the house to try to keep it warm. It is time to Finish the Race. Amen.
Carl L. Schenck
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